Healthcare - I'm on Public Option slow boil by pizmobeach

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Healthcare - I'm on Public Option slow boil

POSTED BY: PIZMOBEACH
UPDATED: Wednesday, October 7, 2009 16:16
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Saturday, October 3, 2009 2:45 AM

Freedom is Important because People are Important

"Funny how all the anti-Govt folks here are silent all of a sudden. I guess it's only hip & cool to be an anarchist or libertarian when there's a Republican Adminstration in power."

Hello,

I think you possibly haven't been paying enough attention.

If you examine the posts in this very thread, you will find that there is a fear amongst libertarians and anarchists that is even greater than their fear of a government monopoly on your life.

And that fear is a fear of government-enabled corporate monopoly on your life.

Which is exactly what this thread is crying out in opposition to. This is not a thread debating the merits of health care reform. It is a thread lamenting the catastrophe of mandatory health care in the absence of a public option alternative.

My own posts on the subject should be quite instructive as to why this is a bad idea.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Saturday, October 3, 2009 10:50 AM

HKCAVALIER

Just wanted to comment on "A list of broken promises is (always) fair." (Is it "necro-posting" if I bring up an issue from 80 posts upthread?

)

First of all, I'm not a big fan of "fair," of course. It's a childish ethic, based on shifting perceptual "equalities" that dumbs down the whole discussion to the level of binary, he said/she said irrelevance.

A conservative complaining about Obama's broken promises is at best ingenuous and at worst undemocratic. Liberals breaking campaign promises mean a win for the conservatives--they should be happy. As an anti-conservative, what I wouldn't give for Bush to have broken some of his campaign promises!

It's about on the level of liberals complaining about some right-wing senator's sex life. Liberals don't care about that crap, so they really shouldn't pretend they do just to gain some political points. "Oooh, let's do everything we can to spin every situation to make the other guy look bad!" To any adults in attendance, this kind of crap just makes you look bad.

And speaking of adults, this sanctification of "campaign promises" has gotta go! Repeat after me: POTUS ≠ Santa Claus. Pretending that all Obama's gotta do is get elected and all the promises will become law the next day is asinine. And acting as if his not doing so is some grand betrayal of us all is just as dunderheaded. I'm far, far more interested in the reasons for not immediately implementing a campaign promise--the who/what/where/why of it--than the mere fact that circumstances have motivated him to change his mind or postpone his actions. He's a g.d. human being whom the country has hired to do a job for which no one is qualified before entering office. Blaming him for the fact that his best laid plans have gone astray is simply naïve. If he's shown to have out-and-out lied, pretended to believe a thing that he actually opposes, well then, that's something. But to expect the President to have absolute control over the political process, well, that simply betrays one's own authoritarian leanings, now don'it?

Obama has made it clear enough to me that he's committed to actual healthcare reform, that he's aware of the stakes for us Americans. I think he's fully aware that if healthcare "reform" becomes nothing but a big giveaway to the insurance lobbies that his "political capital" would be voided and he would be out of a job in just over 3 years. I fully expect that he would veto a bill that would turn the entire Country into Massachusetts. I don't think my confidence is any less credible than any of the cynicism I've seen in this thread. Time will tell. I see we're living out the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times!

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Saturday, October 3, 2009 12:04 PM

BYTEMITE

It's more complicated than him lying, it's the deal-making and compromises I know he's had to make frustrates me. This mandatory insurance is an obvious one. Another obvious one is the actions in Pakistan only six days into his term: that was actually a campaign promise, one I didn't like because it's motivated by other interests.

There's a lot of things that are creeping into the books that aren't things I like. Obama as a target of blame is pointless, the people who are real trouble are the people behind him who he's making these deals with so he can succeed with what he wants to accomplish. There's no other way to do it, the corporate interests (and a number of other interests as well) have the money that Obama needs.

But these same interests have some scary, scary ideas, and they're ALWAYS working towards them. Obama is a pawn.

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Sunday, October 4, 2009 9:31 PM

DREAMTROVE

HK

I kinda gotta agree with the Byte. I think Obama would pick public option, but "health care reform" if it means "you must buy this product" that's not an improvement in anybodies book.

Also, anti-conservative? Is that a position? You are against conserving?

As for democrat sex scandals, that's spin. The right attacks the left for something real, and some GOP tools and media tools come in and help make it all about sex. Check out Ron Paul's speech on Clinton's impeachment. There are some other good one's too. This was about killing lots and lots of people. It makes me sick to see clintons anywhere near the white house, just as it would to Bushes.

Billary bouncing around town pulling strings is just as bad as having elected JEB. If that ain't clear as day, then there's undoubtedly a little reading that you gotta catch up on.

The scariest thing is people who *have* done the research, and still support Clinton. I had one member of the actual Clintonistas say to me "Sometimes Genocide is a viable solution." Here point: Killing one million Iraqi civilians would be worth it to remove Saddam Hussein (screw the fact that it didn't work for the moment...) She was openly admitting that she knew her prez had intentionally killed a million civilians, and thought that it was "the right thing to do." This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd.

So, yeah, criticism is always fair, and welcome. I would hate to live in a country where people had to fall in line and just hope for the best. That's disasterocracy. Or is it disastocracy?

Spellcheck doesn't like either one.

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Monday, October 5, 2009 2:27 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Quote:

Also, anti-conservative? Is that a position? You are against conserving?

You know how you say that the word "socialist" has particular connotations far beyond what was originally intended? Same with "conservative". Nowadays, for a good half the population, it means "backwards, hidebound, refusing to move forward or adapt". Or, more simply, "the party of old white men."

So yeah, you CAN be an "anti-conservative". I got what it meant. Of course, I've never understood those who use "liberal" as if it were a four-letter word, or refer to "progressives" with venom in their voices. Are they against progress?

Mike

The percentage you're paying is too high-priced
While you're living beyond all your means;
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he's made on your dreams

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Monday, October 5, 2009 4:30 AM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

"This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd."

Hello,

I've heard a lot of condemnation of this just recently, and it's interesting to me.

I assume we are all aware of what the alternative would have looked like?

Or the devastation and death caused by what preceded it?

I never seem to hear much condemnation or horror directed in that direction. It seems to have become popular to decry the terrible use of nuclear arms on Japan whilst simultaneously forgetting the much more terrible use of conventional weapons on Japan.

I don't favor an un-balanced view of the situation. It bothers me when people focus on the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes...

and forget the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Monday, October 5, 2009 7:10 AM

BYTEMITE

I think all of them were bad, nuclear weapons AND the firebombing. Neither of those should have happened, because that's a WAR that shouldn't have happened.

And I mean SHOULDN'T. On the Europe front, we shouldn't have tried so hard to punish and ruin Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, though I guess no one could have expected the Great Depression in America or the effect that had on the global economy, or that the Germans would be so quick to rebound. But if Europe hadn't been so distracted, Japan might not have taken advantage of the opportunity.

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009 5:13 PM

DREAMTROVE

Mike,

I disagree. I think that "Republican" has, sure, but "Socialist" was discredited by socialists internationally, and any new form of collectivism that doesn't have a top down central power structure orchestrating everything though direct control over social engineering should get a new name.

Conservatism has not done this yet. The British Conservative party has not gone off the deep end, in fact, it's fairly well rooted in the ideas of the root word, "conservative" as is true in many other, probably most countries. In the US, there are a large number of conservatives who are not loons. We have has "neocons" and "Bush." No one, not even his stalwart conservative supporters called Bush a "conservative" because there is no measure by rights (individual, community or state), resources (natural, mineral), economics(budget, fiscal policy) environmental conservation, even foreign policy, there was nothing conservative in this administration, except maybe a casual nod to the family values crowd, but then, no force behind it. There wasn't even support for business, small or big, unless you were a govt-sponsored corporation. No, conservatives clung to Bush not because they had any illusion that he was conservative, but because he pushed their fear buttons, not just on terrorism, but on what democratic liberalism would be like. He had the advantage of succeeding Clinton in that regard.

But at the same time, you had clearly a lot more support for ron paul, by any measure of rallies, contributions, etc., only computerized voting disagreed, but when it did, it went for John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, all of whom are objectively conservative. The neocons on the ballot like Rudy and Fred (who?) Thompson, with all of their media support, couldn't even poll as high as Steven Colbert.

So, I disagree. Conservative would have to do a lot more than this.

Consider for a moment what the US liberal Democratic party has done without destroying the names "Liberal" or "Democrat":

1. First act: Indian Removal Act
2. Slavery as national policy
3. Several more indian wars
4. Secession, (republicans made a disasterous war out of it, and a disasterous reconstruction)
5. The federal reserve
6. Federal Income Tax
7. World War I
8. The New Deal, and all the spending programs, taxes, which largely just took your money and gave you pennies on the dollar back, but created:
9: The National Debt, which was made worse by:
10: World War II, which ended in:
11: Dropping two nuclear bombs on civilian populations of a long term US ally.
12: Complicit support of disasterous take over of Europe, and China.
13: Another war in Korea
14: A war in Vietnam
15: Deregulation, monopolies, the mark to market train wreck economy, merger mania monopolies, and everything Clinton, Waco, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, and a seldom talked about war in afghanistan, secret torture prisons, domestic wiretapping, halliburton takeover of the military industrial complex, rampant deforestation at home and abroad, the whole sell off of US assets, etc. etc. etc..

Okay, and someone can still run on a ticket with the name Democrat? In retrospect I'm astonished that the party wasn't removed from the ballot in 1832.

So, no, conservative, which has been around for centuries, will survive this. "Neoconservative," will probably not.

Quote:

"This is like the "we had to nuke hiroshima" crowd."

Hello,

I've heard a lot of condemnation of this just recently, and it's interesting to me.

I assume we are all aware of what the alternative would have looked like?

Or the devastation and death caused by what preceded it?

I never seem to hear much condemnation or horror directed in that direction. It seems to have become popular to decry the terrible use of nuclear arms on Japan whilst simultaneously forgetting the much more terrible use of conventional weapons on Japan.

I don't favor an un-balanced view of the situation. It bothers me when people focus on the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes...

and forget the image of incinerated, crisped bodies of women and children, civilians of all stripes.

--Anthony

Tony

I'm not sure what planet you were living on. We attacked Japan in 1937. Japan's attempt to take China and S.E. Asia was bloody imperialism which we're very well familiar with.

But even my brother, China's most stalwart supporter I have ever met, and something of an expert on the subject, said to me: "The stupidest thing the US ever did was to remove the Japanese occupying force."

Now what would lead him to this conclusion.. The US has done an unconscionable number of stupendously stupid things. Here's why: Japan, to China, was order. It was order in source of tremendous power. By removing the Japanese, we created a power vacuum. By all accounts, Chiang Kai Shek was already a worse nightmare than Hirohito, even from a Chinese perspective. All in all, he killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 million people. But he had also proven an inept military leader. In his attempts, aided by us, to defend the mainland against China, he killed far more Chinese civilians than Japanese soldiers, and without US intervention, was going to lose, which he rightly deserved.

But what really filled the power vacuum? We already knew what would happen, in spite of our plans. This wasn't a mystery. Russia had made a grab for China and held Manchuria for longer then the Japanese IIRC. The Soviet sponsorship of a communist revolution by Mao Tse Dong would claim 70 million lives, only just topping the worst humanitarian disaster of all time, the very regime that had sponsored him, our ally, Joseph Stalin.

I want to go back to one line here: "I assume we are all aware of what the alternative would have looked like?"

An alternative? Okay, let's take a good look.

First, there's a conventional war, which we lost at Iwo Jima. Yes, we took, but did not hold, the island of Iwo Jima, at a cost in human lives that was so absurd that it was actually technically impossible to continue.

Our takeover of Japan was going to be almost completely ineffectual, sort of like the French invasion of England in 1066. These victories are sub-pyrrhic. They not only get you nowhere, they actually lose you ground. The Norman conquest of Britain, which should have given Britain to the crown of France, instead gave Normandy to the English. The resulting disaster would be a source of French-English wars for centuries.

There's no question that Japan has held a dominant role over the US since our "Victory" I think we are all "well aware" of that, and in fact, a fair number of us ended up with more respect for them than for us. (Ironically, Hayao Miyazaki is the son of one of the engineers behind the infamous Nipponese "Zero" aircraft)

But let's leave that, and take a look at the mainland. Japanese colonies in China, Indonesia, and Korea would have been most likely short lived. The resulting countries would develop into independent free market states, much like S. Korea, and Taiwan, a long term Japanese possession. But larger entities such as China and Indonesia could have taken over from the Japanese power structure, and perhaps had a less disasterous history than they had. Sure, it *could* have been worse, but given the solid fact that numerically, nothing in human history has ever *been* worse than the aftermath of our "victory," it's not very credible to imply this as a likelihood, much less a certainty.

Sure, it's fair to say that the US and Japan are not to blame for Chiang Kai Shek or Mao Tse Dong, this is really a matter of China and Russia. What we should hold ourselves accountable for is not recognizing the very obvious threat there.

That said, we all know that Zhang Jinghui was a piece of work of the worst class, and Hideki Tojo was nothing short of a Nazi pawn. Still, Which side do you think killed more civilians in WWII? The Axis? Or the Allies?

Before getting on a moral high horse about the necessity of necessary evils, don't assume the audience is ignorant of the situation.

Byte,

Pretty sound, except don't assume that the depression started in America. By all accounts, it started in Germany, with the German war debt, which was imposed by the (Allies.) Of course, technically, those would be the Entente Powers, here's history re-written:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_I

That's a pretty vast distortion. Much of that Green did not fight, and most of what did was colonial possessions. The "Central Powers" were called the "Allies" at the time, but that just confuses things, doesn't it?

WWI is one of the most misunderstood wars. Germany *did* start this one, but it was really a matter of timing. Britain and France were already preparing for the war, and Germany decided to pre-empt the situation by attacking before Russia was ready. This might have prevented a lot of casualties and led to a German victory, which also would have been shortlived, if it weren't for the Kaiser Wilhelm the moron, um, the II, who decided to send half of the army instead of the full army, resulting in utter disaster for everyone. Germany could have played a good defensive game against France, but that had worked out very poorly for them last time.

The imposition of the German war debt was certainly one of the worst ideas ever, since it was a major cause of the great depression and WWII, and when Germany recovered its economy by 1936, Germany was willing to come to an accord with the Allies to remain an independent socio-economic state, much like Iran is currently trying to do. But probably due to a mix of globalist interests and paranoid holdovers from WWI, Allies refused, and started making plans for war with Germany. Contrary to popular history, the war was well underway by '37, really starting in '36, and in 1938, things came to a breaking point. Again, leveler heads in Germany had decided to bank on a defensive posture, and try to stave off an allied attack, as diplomatic measures had obviously prevailed, but Hitler and his band of goons decided to follow the same failed WWI plan of pre-emptive attack. He did not make the same mistake as the Kaiser, but he did make a critical error: The Soviet Union was *not* Czarist Russia. The Czar was hardly ready for war, and was not a technological power. The USSR was *born* for war and was ready from day one. The 1939 non-aggression pact bought Germany 2 years, but those two years would have to have been spent making concessions, and getting an international re-focus on the Soviet threat, rather than a mad dash for Moscow, which was always doomed.

But the worst disaster of WWI was the forced breakup of the Austrian Empire. Austrian dominance of Europe had held the balance of power for 1000 years. The removal, once again, created a power vacuum. If Austria had remained at the time of WWII, there would be no way that Germany would have been able to act as a lone agent. The world scene would have been completely different. Austria would never have capitulated to German military extremists for a second world war, but at the same time, would not be conceivably a target for any Allied attack. Admittedly, we did attack Japan, (please, spare me the Pearl Harbor, no offense to their memories) and Germany did attack Russia, so sanity wasn't exactly running high (Okay, you want an insane more from Japan: Attacking China.) But I think that we would have been forced to recognize Germany as a self-sufficient state if Austria had been in place, and Germany would have had to abandon war plans under the same circumstances.

You are

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009 6:02 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important

Hello Dream,

I'm unfortunately unable to distill from your response exactly what you meant to say in refutation of my statements.

Unless you meant to say that we should have concluded the war with Japan without defeating them?

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Wednesday, October 7, 2009 10:18 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Speaking of the false dichotomy between right/left-dem/rep, Anthony Gregory has a nice piece regarding that which is well worth reading.

I think he picked the wrong title for it, but the subject material is sound.

http://ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle539-20091004-02.html

-F

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Wednesday, October 7, 2009 4:16 PM

DREAMTROVE

Tony

Yes, well, we lost the war, by any measure.

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